Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Class war....we're seeing only the tip of the iceberg

A cab driver taking my wife and me from the Penn
Station in downtown Manhattan to our hotel in March of this year, when asked if
he attends hockey games of the New York Rangers, or basketball games of the New
York Knicks, responded, “I can’t go to any of those games; I don’t make enough
money! Those games are now only for the rich.” Many of the professional sports
teams have erected “box seats” to capture the executive class, whose pockets
and whose corporations are deep and eager to ‘entertain’ clients in the most
“classy” manner available....the next sports spectacle.

A new measure of the “success” of a country is the
rising number of billionaires, just another way by which the large global
players attempt to establish and sustain their “status” among the other
nations. In the new suburbs, mega-mansions of 5000-plus square feet are
attracting the same clients who frequent those “suites” at the pro football,
basketball and hockey games. In some medium-sized cities, the arrival of BMW,
Lexus and Acura dealerships are taken by some as signs of the city’s “growth”.
And in those same cities, the erosion of library services, resulting from
slashes to municipal and provincial budgets, the vacuuming of funds from the
healthcare system, the rise in class
sizes in our schools....these are all nearly overlooked, while the corporate
world, including the media, trumpet the “gloss” of growth.

The labour movement has been decimated, perhaps
originally due to its over-reach but more recently resulting from the
“conventional” wisdom that free enterprise, entrepreneurialism, the removal of
government regulations (notwithstanding the glaring abuses and the epic
disaster we all faced in 2008-9 from the over-reach of the greed and manipulation
of Wall Street financiers). In the United States, both political parties are
metaphorically and literally dependent on those same financiers and their
largesse, now that the Supreme Court has opened the flood gates to corporate
money in political campaigns in their decision on Citizens United.

When the twin sacred cows of “free speech” and
“individualism” (rugged or not) are married in another of the thousands of
“hybrid” generations of our culture, then, of course, the public good, the
common good, the centrifugal force of commonality that once held the community
together, in war, in famine, in disaster and in periods of perceived threat,
one of the principal gifts of those ugly patches of history, has to be sacrificed.
When there is a perceived and trusted truth to the notion that we share our
destiny, in our families, in our schools, in our towns and cities, and yes even
in our countries, there is some likelihood that those bodies will indeed
“hold”. They will be there for our children and our grandchildren, if perhaps
offering some different programs with new approaches dependent on new research.
When there is a level of civility, respect and trust that most people in our
daily encounter are, have been and will be sharing both the high’s and the
low’s of the vagaries of what were once called the “changes in the market” or
the disaster of “—“ whatever year it was that the hurricane or the tornado or
the fire or the robbery befell our community, then there is a sense of
belonging, and sense that we all have a place and a purpose within our
‘sphereof influence’.

Now, in an age of global markets, of global prices,
of global anonymity, of global information, of the onslaught of 24-7-365 news
cycles, and of the mega-shifts in where and how and by whom we produce much of
the stuff that appears on our store shelves, the definition of community has
changed, and the vulnerability of each of us, both individually and
collectively, to the bacteria (of all kinds, biological, economic, political,
military, environmental, religious, cultural) that invade even a small corner
of our planet, unites us in a vastly different way from the way in which we
grew up.

And the attitudinal and perceptional shift that is
being required, even expected, of each of us, and especially of our leaders, to
adjust to this shift, amounts to something far more impacting than a marriage
where two different backgrounds begin to inhabit the same quarters. It was
Robert Frost who reminded us that “good fences make good neighbours”. And in
neighbourhoods, those fences have become a comforting and comfortable fixture.
Unfortunately however, building fences to “keep out” our most threatened
neighbours, in a geopolitical and inter-dependent world, simply does not and
will not work.

The fence that divides Palestinians from Jews in
Israel, the fence that divides Mexicans from Americans, the oceans that divide
Africa from Europe and Myanmar from Malaysia and Indonesia will not “keep out”
both the persons and the overwhelming “fact” of the destitution of those
persons from our conscious awareness nor from our actual towns, cities and
countries. Words like starvation and dehydration characterize the condition of
these thousands of migrants, many of them fleeing war, others fleeing
persecution as religious minorities.

We have to learn that shooting those “migrants” over
land or water is merely an exaggerated expression of our fear, especially of
our fear that those hordes of people will destroy whatever social and political
and economic fabric we have constructed over the centuries in some cases. Some
of our shared discontent arrives from our anxiety over the potential these
migrants will have on our “infrastructure” including the capacity of our hard
services, employment rates and even our capacity to integrate these hordes into
what we perceive as a ‘stable’ culture.

We all know that people like Warren Buffet and Bill
and Melinda Gates are aligned in sharing their estates with the most
impoverished. And for that we can all be grateful; however given the size and
scope of the deepening pockets of poverty, hunger, disease and hopelessness,
even the billions they will deploy in the attempt to rescue the millions will
have a small impact. Along with the many other foundations, including the
Clinton Global Foundation, these efforts while commendable, are little more
than cups of water in a parched dessert.

And with the inevitable consequences of global
warming and climate change, producing drought, severe weather conditions, the
impairment of growing opportunities, and the rising number of mouths to feed,
especially in this protracted period of conflict and apparent powerlessness of
the geopolitical leaders to find accommodations to bring warring parties to a
negotiating table, the numbers of dispossessed persons, fearing for their
lives, and dependent on the unscrupulous and wanton greed of their accomplices
in their desperate migrations, is going to grow exponentially and very quickly.

Unfortunately, we have a limited capacity to adapt to
these desperate fellow human beings seeking refuge and willing to sacrifice
their lives in the hope that their children will live, given our history of
abundance, comfort, stability and opportunity, linked to our historic and
determined ignorance,( “out of sight, out of mind” given the perceived distance,
geographic and political, cultural and
religious,). Not only is our capacity limited, but so is our will.

And yet, these migrants, these refugees, these
dispossessed, these starving and desperate hungry, frightened and often sick
are signals on the global radar that we have to acknowledge, not by refusing
them refuge, but by adapting international norms and processes by which they
can and will be supported in their legitimate quest for a decent life.

And we will have to adjust without adopting
attitudes they these people who represent the most deprived and depraved on the
planet, that they deserve their plight and we can turn a blind eye, a deaf ear
and an empty larder. This could become the depression of 1929 on steroids. And
peopleby the hundreds riding the rails
in search of food and work and a place to sleep could be a harbinger of things
to come, only on a much more epic scale.

Can we adopt and provide safety, security and decent
lives for these people who literally have no place on the planet?